


Recruitment

by ocjones



Series: The Triad [1]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: A totally original joke about structural weakness, Canon-Typical Violence, Control Ending, Post-Game(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-22
Updated: 2015-07-22
Packaged: 2018-04-10 14:31:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4395515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ocjones/pseuds/ocjones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Recruiting crew members has always been what Shepard does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recruitment

Kaidan is not surprised to see a geth prime stride over to him, even as he's crouched behind cover. Synthetic life is everywhere now—geth and Reapers, all benevolent (mostly). The geth's eyelight flicks over him. “Captain Kaidan Alenko, we are performing a scan of your neural network.”

“Why?” Kaidan asks. He splatters dark red on the geth's cold metal. If he's bleeding from the mouth, things don't look good.

“I will stay with you,” the geth says instead. “You should not be alone.”

Kaidan looks down at his wound. The enemy had had two snipers. The first shot ripped through his shields and the second ripped through him before his shields could come back. He knows there's not enough medi-gel in the world to fix this hole.

Sometimes he wished he would die, old and gray, on that apple orchard overlooking English Bay, but since he'd ripped the jaw off Vyrnnus, he'd known it wasn't going to happen. His death is always going to be here, on a battlefield.

His omni-tool is malfunctioning. “Can you...” He coughs. “Can you send a message to my mother? Tell her I love her.”

“Acknowledged,” the geth says, and then Kaidan's gone.

* * *

 

He wakes up all at once, already standing. He is in a full set of armor, dark blue, unscathed. It's one he hasn't worn in years.

He's somewhere strange, white, with a huge window to his left. He squints; oddly, it looks like he's on the Citadel.

“You are on the Citadel.”

His head jerks and he sees the woman standing in front of him. She's the woman whose life, and then whose death, have dominated his existence. “No,” she says easily, responses in sync with his thoughts. “I am not Shepard. I am the Controller. I was founded with the thoughts and memories of Shepard. She sacrificed her human life to create me.”

“Why am I here?”

His understanding is perfect when she replies, “Aite.”

* * *

 

At first, it is lonely. He moves easily, without aches and pains, but also without a heartbeat or the need to breathe. “Although I have data on what you looked like at the time of your death, Shepard's memories have recorded you like this. Besides,” she says, with no humor at all, “it is distracting to be so covered in blood. It would make a mess.”

Kaidan stares out the window and loses all sense of everything, like a piece of technology simply going to sleep after not being used. Shepard withdraws from his mind, he knows, not reading his thoughts, but he eventually learns to feel the power of her presence. It's so constant that it's hard to detect, but it awes him when he senses it. Though Shepard's figure faces away from him, he always feels the thrum of her existence. He is but one unit and she domineers hundreds of thousands, him included.

He awakes when something new happens. It's Garrus. The turian whispers, “Shepard?” and Kaidan's heart is broken all over again when the Controller calmly explains that she's not, that _it's_ not.

“I miss Shepard,” Kaidan spits before he means to, and it's angry.

“You have no emotions. Though you'd be surprised how much memories can begin to feel like emotions.” He thinks he sees her eyes flick like a geth's, all light and nothing behind it. “Or maybe you aren't surprised.”

Jack arrives still cursing and doesn't stop cursing when the Controller explains what's happened. Joker appears and makes a joke about bones being structural weaknesses, to which Shepard-Controller does not smile. Samara is next, then Tali, then Wrex _and_ Grunt at once. Lawson takes a long time, with her perfect DNA. In between new arrivals, Kaidan exists but does not. He feels them in his mind but only traces: Jack's eezo burn, twice as strong as his; Grunt and Wrex's boiling anger and krogan pride; Samara's calm meditations. It's hard to hold onto them with his slippery sleepy fingers and mind, and he knows he is as ephemeral to them. He thinks of breathing Aite's air and watching blood soak into its ground.

Long-lived Liara is last, completing the crew of the _Normandy_. The Shepard-Controller faces them all and clasps her hands behind her back, a move too human for her. “I am not a perfect AI,” she says. “My interface was created from imperfect human memories and feelings. Indeed, this is not even a perfect reconstruction of Shepard's crew. Thane Krios and Mordin Solus, among others, were gone before I gained control.” She flickers a little. “Some of my processes have recently become concerned about the actions of this intelligence.”

“Which actions?” asks Liara.

“I control the creatures you know as the reapers. Some of you suspected this and your ideas were not received well. This reinforces my thought that you understood Shepard.” Her arms straighten to her sides. “Five hundred and twelve years ago, there was a problem on Aite.”

It's the first time they've ever been awake together for this long. Kaidan reaches out to link his mind with the others', searching for peace. He feels Garrus' sharp surprise about the amount of time that's passed and once again wonders how the fuck Shepard-Controller could think they have no feelings. It's again Liara who asks, “What happened?”

“Kaidan,” Shepard-Controller says, fixing impossible eyes and impossible mind on him, “explain.”

* * *

 

He does not use words—it's too hard and too slow. He shows them the surveillance video he had seen; Shepard-Controller fills in the rest. Aite, the lush jungle of a planet where they had all crashed after the war, was the site of a memorial built in honor of the few crewmembers who had died. The geth were working quietly on its construction. Shepard-Controller flicks their minds to what Kaidan had not seen, what the geth had observed. Two turians passed. “Can you believe they would build a memorial for this damned crew? The reapers are still here.”

The turian makes a low noise of displeasure. “I have no qualms about Shepard. But whatever Shepard did, these fools deserve no credit for it.”

It happens immediately—that's the glory of her kind of processing power. The geth who witnesses this reaches for something and then shoots both turians dead. They calmly bury the bodies next to the memorial site. Kaidan feels sick but his mind is not his own; she's controlling him as she's controlling everything else, and he cannot leave these memories.

Later, the Alliance found the bodies and knew it was the geth by the wounds. _Be alert for further incidents_ , Hackett warned him in a message, but Kaiden thought it was futile. What could they be prepared for? The galaxy wasn't ready for another war; it was barely limping towards recovery. It was the first incident and, as far as he knows, the last. “It was the last,” Shepard-Controller confirms. “But it was not acceptable. I now have reason to suspect this intelligence is vengeful.”

“It is disquieting,” continues Shepard-Controller, “but the woman on whom I am based had similar concerns. She was worried. There is a human saying, 'Absolute power corrupts absolutely.' I cannot allow that to become true.” She turns away from them. Kaidan swear for a moment he feels embarrassment in the Controller's space.“Shepard needed her crew. If I am built from Shepard, then I need her crew.” She straightens, and a surge of powerful code goes through them. For a moment he sees what he knows happened, what he has never wanted to see, Shepard between three choices with blood soaking her beautiful human skin. It all burns to ashes as her existence obliterates into this objective consciousness which, despite its supposed similarities to his own, feels strange. “I will reset you if you try to rebel, to grow like the reapers,” she warns. “Everyone in this galaxy must be kept _safe_ —”

“Of course.”

It's from Miranda. The Shepard-Controller turns. “Of course we will stay.”

Kaidan realizes then what the geth, his brethren, mean when they say _consensus_ . The agreement is clear between them. Garrus still regrets having to leave his best friend alone for the most difficult decision in history, and Tali worries about whether she can really help, and Miranda's sharp mind is scrambling for something to do in the same way Grunt's is hankering for something to shoot. The Shepard-Controller glows brighter and brighter until there is a flash of color, and there they are. The _Normandy_ . Shepard is at the galaxy map and Joker's in the cockpit and Traynor's checking messages for anyone, everyone, who needs help and Kaidan can feel James doing pull-ups two floors down. _We will protect them_ , the Shepard-Controller says, looking at the map, and they all echo in consensus, _We will_.

**Author's Note:**

> This is part 1 of "The Triad" series, which will contain a different fic for each ending possibility. Thanks for reading!


End file.
